Republican Rep. Joyce: Unemployment caused by drunk, high workforce not lack of jobs

Add to the many reasons people can’t find jobs — a weak economy, offshoring, technology disruption, employer uncertainty — this rationale, from Republican Rep. Dave Joyce: too many of us are just too drunk or high to get a job.

Joyce (R-OH), spoke with the Stow-Munroe Falls Chamber of Commerce this week about the economy and Congress. He told them that there are millions of jobs going unfilled in America “because they either can’t find people to come to work sober, daily, drug-free and want to learn the necessary skills going forward to be able to do those jobs.”

It is a given that millions of jobs will be unfilled at least temporarily in the natural churn of the economy during good times and bad, according to Department of Labor data, but Joyce chalked up his assertion that the unemployed were simply people who were drunk or drug users to anecdotal feedback from business owners, the Huffington Post reported.

“3.9 million jobs go unfilled in this country each month,” Joyce’s spokeswoman Christyn Keyes said to the Huffington Post. “Rep. Joyce sees that as an enormous problem and to fix a problem, you must accurately diagnose it. Rep. Joyce has made it a top priority to meet with small business owners and job creators and a concern that comes up time and time again is substance abuse among the workforce and adequate workforce training. …Rep. Joyce came to Washington to be a fact-based problem solver and during this 20-second clip of a 15-minute speech,” she added, “he was simply sharing the concerns of small-business owners with other local business leaders.”

Watch Joyce share his apparent concerns about substance abuse in the workforce in this clip below.